Surprisingly enough, it is Microsoft and its portal of websites that were at the top of the heap with an average of 3,920 hours. Not only did visitors spend more time on Microsoft websites, but the number of these visitors increased 43% from last year.

Google actually led the pack with a 48% percentage gain, but still lagged behind Microsoft significantly in time spent with an average of 2,512.

Yahoo, AOL and Fox all saw declines in time spent on their sites, with Fox suffering an abysmal decrease of 44%.

Of course, the report doesn’t track what visitors spent their time doing on the sites or why they visited in the first place, but it still serves as a good barometer for portal popularity. Microsoft, especially, with Adcenter being a very affordable PPC alternative, looks to be a good source of content leads for any marketing campaign.

Many search engine professionals have had the opportunity to test and play with the Google Caffeine sandbox for the last several months. But the sandbox has closed shop, which usually is a sure-fire sign that a new launch is right around the corner.

In a video conducted with Matt Cutts back in August, WebProNews got some of the skinny on the new Caffeine changes.

The long and short of the interview is that Caffeine marks a major “rewrite of [Google's] entire indexing system.” Cutts stated that end-users should not to be alarmed since they won’t notice much of a change. Most of the updates are going into the product under the hood for “more flexibility and power” in handling content.

The content posing the biggest challenge, of course, is all of the real-time material and media generated in the social space. Google Caffeine will be better wired to handle all of the Web 2.0 content like blogs, tweets, and bookmarks.

While the recipe for a good keyword strategy is unique on a case by case basis, Google provides a keyword research tool that can help make some effective determinations. The tool is called Google Insights for Search and it has made it into my repertoire of tools I use to compile data for making keyword decisions.

Using the tool is a fairly straightforward. Enter the search terms of interest, in this case, the geographically relevant phrases being considered (i.e. phoenix real estate, scottsdale real estate, chandler real estate and mesa real estate). Filter your results as desired; in this example the filter is set to Web Search – United States – Arizona – Last 12 Months. Press “Go” and Google Insights generates a chart of the keyword usage and also provides some related keyword stats.

A quick review of the stats show us that Phoenix is the most popular area, with Scottsdale, Mesa and Chandler performing behind it in that order. The graph also shows searches for these areas trending downward, especially “scottsdale real estate” whose search interest has recently dropped to the levels of Mesa and Chandler.

One other key finding is that the related search phrase “real estate listings” is up 170 percent over the past year. This is valuable information to consider when crafting a keyword strategy for a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign or On-Page SEO.